To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. Proudhon

Well, I am back where I began twenty years ago with Simple Scanning. The difference is that I have an entirely different philosophy about it - a philosophy which I will attempt to describe in this and subsequent posts.

As I said in an earlier article, there are two ways of looking at a long “catch-all” list.

The first is that you capture everything on your list which you have to do and then use a system to get all of it done. This is what I was trying to do with it all those years ago. And of course I failed.

The second is that you capture everything that you might do on your list and then use a system to sift the list so that the viable things on it get done, and the rest are sifted out. If there is a lot which you don’t do then you have succeeded.

The basic difference between the two is that with the first what you haven’t done is seen as more important than what you have done. In the second what you have done is seen as more important than what you haven’t done.

With the first, if you didn’t succeed in doing something then you would see the possible causes as:

You experienced strong resistance

You couldn’t get yourself in the right mood to do it

You didn’t want to do it

You kept putting it off

You found it really hard

You thought it would be a lot of work

You weren’t sure how to handle it

You just couldn’t get started

You did a load of trivial make-work in order to avoid it

With the second, the reasons would be entirely different

I chose not to do it

It didn’t feel right for me at this time

I decided it would interfere with my existing work

I tried it but it didn’t work for me

I found a better way of doing the same thing

In other words the reasons for the second put you in a positive, not a negative, light. It’s the task which didn’t pass your selection, rather than you who failed to get the task done.

Reader Comments (5)

Yes! Recognizing that there are two types of lists was a big step for me.

I have ADHD. I need the catch-all list. If I don't capture it, it will hang around in my brain until I do, not letting me do anything else. But, not all things on the list are equally important.

For me, the dangerous time is when I start to pull ahead. I get too optimistic, and start re-activating less-important projects, then do too much on them, fall behind on important things, and burn out. Moving things to a hibernation list is critical for me.

I used catch-all list a lot. Probably, from year 2014 until this September.Now I switched from list to No-list system. I was afraid that I will forget some important things if I don’t have them written. But I what I found is that if something is really important, it will show up again and again and I will get it done.

The main problem with list I thing lays in different space. I found that I have not achieved anything significant as I wanted. Yes, I did a lot. And list helped me and I was on top of everything some days. But after years, I still where I was. I have not made my business successful and it doesn’t matter if I did a lot small tasks or not. I have not done what was really important.

What I’m trying to do now is get rid from everything that is not works for business promotion. And I have found that I don’t need a huge list for few things that really matters. And everything else just don’t matter a lot.